As I mentioned in a previous post I have been focusing on media consumption on the Raspberry Pi with things like OpenELEC but after writing about SqueezePlug I thought I would see how well it would work. To recap SqueezePlug is a media server application for the Raspberry Pi that can run headless and supports various steaming services. 

Full instructions are on the developers site but its a very simple process.

Once you have downloaded the image and copied it to an SD card you can boot up the Raspberry Pi and connect to it from a SSH console or from the Raspberry Pi its self. From Windows you can use Putty to connect to the Pi (If you have a Mac you can use the SSH command built into Mac OS), for that you will need to know the Raspberry Pi’s ip address which you should be able to find on your router (I use a great Android app called Fing to find IP addresses and ports) and then logging in with the user name root, password nosoup4u. You then select the Raspberry Pi option and it’s a reboot “shutdown -r now”, log back in and run setup.

You then run setup and pick your server type, I picked Twonky, I also tried MiniDLNA and got the same results. 

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Next you can add the storage locations, I used a USB stick for storing my content but you could use a USB hard drive, the SD card or a network storage location. 

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So once you have added the storage and another reboot you are ready to browse the content from any UPNP device, I tried VLC on my Mac

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It streamed mkv, mp4 and mp3 files over my network with no problem at all. I had no problem streaming content to my iPad using GoodPlayer, Android using Twonky Mobile and Windows Phone using HTC Connect Media. You can also install a transcoding addin and SqueezeSlave a media player for the Raspberry Pi.

So if you fancy making your own UPNP server then this is a great solution, hats off to the developer of Squeezeplug for the Pi it’s a really nice project

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